EBOOK Explaining Institutional Change in Europe

How and why do institutions change? Institutions, understood as rules of behaviour        constraining and facilitating social interaction, are subject to different forms and        processes of change. A change may be designed intentionally on a large scale and        then be followed by a period of only incremental adjustments to new conditions. But        institutions may also emerge as informal rules, persist for a long time and only be        formalized later. Why? The causes, processes and outcomes ofinstitutional change        raise a number of conceptual, theoretical and empirical questions. While we know a        lot about the creation of institutions, relatively little research has been        conducted about their transformation once they have been put into place. Attention        has focused on politically salient events ofchange, such as the Intergovernmental        Conferences of Treaty reform. In focussing on such grand events, we overlook        inconspicuous changes of European institutional rules that are occurring on a daily        basis. Thus, the European Parliament has gradually acquired a right of investing        individual Commissioners. This has never been an issue in the negotiations of formal        treaty revisions. Or, the decision-making rule(s) under which the European        Parliament participates in the legislative process havedrastically changed over the        last decades starting from a modest consultation ending up with codecision. The book        discusses various theories accounting for long-term institutional change and        explores them on the basis of five important institutional rules in the European        Union. It proposes typicalsequences of long-term institutional change and their        theorization which hold for other contexts as well, if the number of actors and        their goals are clearly defined, and interaction takes place under the "e;shadow of        the future"e; .